Knowledge that Transforms

This paper explores the links between exports, export destinations, and skill utilization. We identify two mechanisms behind these links: differences across destinations in quality valuation and in exporting required services, activities that are intensive in skilled labor. Depending on the characteristics of the source country (income, language), the theories suggest a skill-bias in export destinations. We test the theory using a panel of Argentine manufacturing firms. We find that Argentine firms exporting to high-income countries hired more skilled workers than other exporters and domestic firms. Instead, we cannot identify any causal effect of exporting per se on skill utilization. (JEL F14, F16, J24, L60, O14, O19)

This research examines the relationship between the economic status of an immigrant's home country and the probability of self-employment in the US. We find that immigrants from developing countries on average have lower self-employment probabilities relative to immigrants from developed countries. Similarly, we find a positive correlation between the current HDI of an immigrant's home country and the probability of self-employment in the US. These result are unexpected given that past research suggests immigrants from countries with high levels of self-employment (developing countries) are more likely to be self-employed in the US. We provide a possible explanation for these results.

A model of public and private liquidity integrates financial intermediation theory with a New Monetarist monetary framework. Non-passive fiscal policy and costs of operating a currency system imply that an optimal policy deviates from the Friedman rule. A liquidity trap can exist in equilibrium away from the Friedman rule, and there exists a permanent nonneutrality of money, driven by an illiquidity effect. Financial frictions can produce a financial-crisis phenomenon that can be mitigated by conventional open market operations working in an unconventional manner. Private asset purchases by the central bank are either irrelevant or they reallocate credit and redistribute income. (JEL E13, E44, E52, E62, G01)

Firms and workers may sign complex contracts that govern many aspects of their interactions. I show that when firms regard contracts as substitutes, bargaining over contracts can be understood as bargaining only over wages. Substitutes is the assumption commonly used to guarantee the existence of stable matchings of workers and firms. JEL: C78, D86, J31, J41

We show that large retailers, competing with smaller stores that carry a narrower range, can exercise market power by pricing below cost some of the products also offered by the smaller rivals, in order to discriminate multistop shoppers from one-stop shoppers. Loss leading thus appears as an exploitative device rather than as an exclusionary instrument, although it hurts the smaller rivals as well; banning below-cost pricing increases consumer surplus, rivals' profits, and social welfare. Our insights extend to industries where established firms compete with entrants offering fewer products. They also apply to complementary products such as platforms and applications. (JEL L11, L13, L81)

We study the design of interventions to stabilize financial markets plagued by adverse selection. Our contribution is to analyze the information revealed by participation decisions. Taking part in a government program carries a stigma, and outside options are mechanism dependent. We show that the efficiency of an intervention can be assessed by its impact on the market interest rate. The presence of an outside market determines the nature of optimal interventions and the choice of financial instruments (debt guarantees in our model), but it does not affect implementation costs. (JEL D82, D86, G01, G20, G31)

Using a matched employer-employee data set, we study the effects of trade liberalization on wage dispersion in Brazil across heterogeneous worker groups, keeping in mind that the assignment of workers to firms may be non-random and determined by the time-invariant productivity of workers specific to the firms with which they are matched. We find differential effects of trade reform on residual wage inequality across worker groups. High education workers experience greater increases in wage dispersion relative to low education workers following trade liberalization. This finding is broadly consistent with the theoretical predictions that emerge from models with heterogeneous firms, heterogeneous workers, and labor market frictions.

This paper reports an experiment in 640 Indonesian villages on three approaches to target the poor: proxy-means tests (PMT), where assets are used to predict consumption; community targeting, where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest; and a hybrid. Defining poverty based on PPP$2 per-capita consumption, community targeting and the hybrid perform somewhat worse in identifying the poor than PMT, though not by enough to significantly affect poverty outcomes for a typical program. Elite capture does not explain these results. Instead, communities appear to apply a different concept of poverty. Consistent with this finding, community targeting results in higher satisfaction.

Recent crises have seen large spikes in asset price risk. We propose an explanation for such panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in beliefs about risk. A negative link between the current level and the future risk of an asset price leads to a circular relationship between the stochastic process of asset price risk and the price itself. Self-fulfilling shifts in perceived risk can be coordinated around a pure sunspot or around a macro fundamental. In a risk panic, a macro fundamental can be a focal point that affects both the magnitude of the panic and subsequent shifts in perceived risk.

We propose a method that enables one to test efficient risk sharing even when households have different risk preferences. The method is composed of three tests. The first one determines whether in the data households have homogeneous risk preferences. The second and third tests evaluate efficient risk sharing when the hypothesis of homogeneous risk preferences is rejected. We use this method to test efficient risk sharing in rural India. Using the first test, we strongly reject the hypothesis of identical risk preferences. Using the second and third tests, we reject efficiency at the village but not at the caste level. (JEL D12, D86, G22, O12, O18, R23, Z13)